South Los Angeles

South Los Angeles is a 51-square-mile region of Los Angeles County, California, comprising 25 neighborhoods within the city of Los Angeles and three unincorporated neighborhoods. The region includes Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw, Florence, Leimert Park, and Watts, among other neighborhoods. During the 1920s, the wealthy built mansions in West Adams and Jefferson Park while the white working class established itself in Crenshaw and Hyde Park; affluent African-Americans later moved into West Adams and Jefferson Park.

During the Great Depression, lower and middle-class blacks poured into the severely overcrowded South LA neighborhood, and the region saw significant racial violence during the 1950s, with whites bombing, firing into, and burning crosses on the lawns of homes purchased by black families south of Slauson. White gangs in nearby cities such as South Gate and Huntington Park routinely accosted blacks who travleed through white areas, leading to the creation of black mutual protection clubs, becoming the basis of the region's feared street gangs. 1950s freeway construction reinforced traditional segregation lines, and the explosive growth of suburbs, most of which barred blacks by a variety of methods, allowed for whites in neighborhoods bordering black districts to leave en masse. Real estate developers engaged in blockbusting; they would sell a house on a white street to a black family, leading to the racist white families on the street being forced to sell their homes to the real estate developers, who then resold the houses to housing-hungry black families for a hefty profit.

Beginning in the 1970s, the rapid decline of the area's manufacturing base resulted in a loss of the jobs that allowed skilled union workers to have a middle class life. Downtown Los Angeles' service sector, which had long been dominated by unionized blacks, replaced most black workers with newly arrived Mexican and Central American immigrants. Widespread unemployment, poverty, and street crime contributed to the rise of street gangs such as the Crips and Bloods, which became even more powerful with money from drugs, especially the crack cocaine trade, dominated by gangs during the 1980s. By the 2000s, the crime rate had lowered significantly, with redevelopment, improved police patrol, community-based police programs, gang intervention work, and youth development organizations lowered the murder rates to levels not seen since the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, the neighborhood was still known for gangs at the time, and the city changed neighborhood's name from "South Central" to "South Los Angeles" in mid-2003 in a move to erase the stigma that dogged the southern part of the city.

South Los Angeles became a predominantly-minority neighborhood; between 1970 and 1990, South LA went from 80% black and 9% Latino to 50.3% black and 44% Latino. In 2010, South Los Angeles had a population of 768,456, with 64% being Latino and 31.4% being black